


A Road of Ice and Nails

by Avelera



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cold War, Espionage, F/M, M/M, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Russia, Steve is never frozen, War Veteran Steve Rogers, cold war au, spy AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:56:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6795709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avelera/pseuds/Avelera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a theory back in the Cold War that one man, in the right place at the right time, could be better than an army...<br/>After Bucky’s fall from the train, Steve puts the plane down in the Arctic. Unfortunately, he survives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Road of Ice and Nails

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something I started a few years ago speculating on what Steve could have become during the Cold War, given that he doesn’t age, and that Bucky isn’t dead. Posting it to gauge interest in a continuation. I hope you enjoy!

**1971**

He once was a kid from Brooklyn. A lot of the operatives in SHIELD, in the CIA, in MI-5 can say similar things. They didn’t sign up for this kind of warfare. A lot of them had visions of something bigger, something grander. The kind of glass-clear and steel-sharp purity that fighting the Nazis had given them during the war.

Steve still looked young, and he felt himself drifting away from his own brothers in arms as they aged. After twenty years, he looked no older than when he first stepped out of the machine, and if they don’t recognize him immediately they wonder who this kid is, this fresh-faced American boy who has come to tell them how to do their jobs.

He had little interest in doing that. He just wants the file, the mission, to get on with it and focus on chipping away at the problems he can face. He doesn’t accept partners anymore, and the kids that are the same age as when he and Bucky enlisted look absurdly young to him.

He didn’t regret it, enlisting, signing up to do his part and make sure others don’t die for him. If anything it makes him more determined to end this war before another couple boys from Brooklyn had to do it all again, because his generation couldn’t finish job, because they hadn’t ended those threats with the war. Because they had let fear and distrust shred a world already torn and bleeding.

The Cold War felt like an appropriate name for it.

He was tired.

* * *

It was the third assassination that month. SHIELD was baffled, the US government was writing the kills off as accidents, and Steve was boarding a plane for Berlin.

It wasn’t his first time in the city that crouched within its walls like a personal reminder of his country’s failure. Tearing a country down the middle like that, dividing its people and giving on part over to the mercy of their ally. But Steve was just a chorus dancer turned soldier, or so he had been assured when he stood up and called it wrong.

Captain America’s word carried some weight, but not enough, and the wall went up anyway.

* * *

Peggy was growing older, and he was not. It didn’t bother him, he told her this over and over while he cupped her fingers against his lips, kissing each one of them in turn. And she just smiled sadly and thanked him while her gaze wandered. He knew he was losing her, that she was falling away from him while he was stuck in time, the eternally young boy from Brooklyn, and that night he returned alone to their apartment.

He could still bleed, even if he couldn’t age, he remembered this when he pulled his fist free of the mirror, the glass tingling as it fell free of cuts that were already healing.

Peggy requested a divorce six months later. Two years after that he sent her a note congratulating her on her wedding. Another soldier, ironically one of the men he had rescued during the war.

She invited him, but as he explained in his letter, he was sure she would understand that an assignment had called him away. He hoped she would enjoy the fondue set he had sent as a wedding gift.

* * *

Steve knew he wasn’t himself anymore. He hadn’t felt right since the war, and when he was honest with himself (and wasn’t Captain America always honest?) he knew he hadn’t been alright since an empty, bombed-out bar when it finally sunk in that Bucky was gone and he was never coming back. That it wasn’t going to get better with Peggy there, and it wouldn’t get better once all of HYDRA was killed or captured.

Eriskine had told him the serum would augment whatever was inside of a person. People like Schmidt, the bad, got worse. They became grotesque parodies of themselves, grinning skulls drenched in blood. What did that make him?

Colder than he had once been, harder. He had remembered having more raw strength before. He had become leaner, he knew that much, and it was as if some of that lost muscle had gone towards deadly precision. He was a better shot than he had ever been, he could pin a fly to a wall at a hundred yards with the shield. But the shield no longer felt right in his hand, in a world where a shield had become an iron curtain. It struck a bit too close to home. But to turn aside from it would mean admitting those days were really gone, and like the nation itself he couldn’t quite admit that the era of clean purpose was behind him.

Maybe that’s all it was: he’s become a better soldier for a different time. Adapted, as if his body could sense the political currents out of the air, picking them up like a radio, transforming him to suit the purposes of war. He wore a gray suit instead of blue armor, the stars and stripes were everywhere and yet out of fashion at the same time. Nationalism was at once out of vogue and savagely defended. Captain America was an embarrassment as much as he was a hero, a grinning fool of nostalgia. So he vanished into the work, dyed his hair black, learned Russian and German with serum-augmented senses that needed to only hear a word once to have it committed to memory.

He began to track leads. They started in Helsinki, crossed quickly over into Leningrad and south into the heartland of Russia. He blended in, found a car and drove down pot-hole marked roads lined with great murals of Lenin. “Comrade, you are on the right road,” they said, which was really not helpful when he didn’t know which road he was on.

The Winter Soldier stayed ahead of him, but so far with no indication that he knew there was anyone on his trail. He was going to Moscow, that much was obvious, and perhaps once behind the curtain he didn’t feel as much of the need to disguise his movements. The metal arm was covered, but a man with shoulder-length brown hair, who only spoke in grunts and never stayed more than a few hours in a single place still drew attention. The Winter Soldier was tireless, but so was Steve.

It should have been eventful when he caught up to the Winter Soldier.

It should have been a fight, loud and explosive, emotions and bullets flying. There should have been something more than when he arrived at the dusty little canteen a hundred kilometers outside Moscow, turned, and saw James Buchanan Barnes staring back at him.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” the man spat in Russian, pulling his arm out from under Steve’s hand. The canteen was full of people, even if there was only one drink on tap, and something came back to Steve, the old instinct to protect. There were civilians here, and he put up his hands, flat and unthreatening.

“Apologies, friend. I must have mistaken you for someone else. Let me buy you a drink to make it up to you,” Steve said.

The man wearing Bucky’s face eyed him, then his gaze flickered to the exits, to the bar, and back to Steve. He recognized what Steve has. Either of them, Captain America or the Winter Soldier, could kill every man and woman in this room, but that would mean more cleanup than perhaps either of their masters wanted to deal with. He could leave, but Steve would certainly pursue him, and once outside he would not have to hold back. Bucky watched him, sizing him up, and seemed to decide he was not so certain he wanted to take Steve on. His mission would have just wrapped up, his orders were unclear as to how much cover he had before he returned home.

Bucky nodded, curt and quick, and settled on one of the bar stools. There was an open one beside him, clearly not his intention but Steve took it anyway. Each glimpse of Bucky’s face was like vertigo, and he was staring across twenty years to a man who had not aged anymore than him. Sleeper agent? Captured by the enemy? It was only Steve’s time undercover that kept his throat from closing up there from threatening tears. Instead he breathed past it, kept his hands steady as he ordered a bottle of vodka for the both of them and gave the rubels out up front. The men around them eyed him for the money he was throwing down, but seemed to recognize a threat when they saw one, because they turned away without challenging him. He leaned in towards Bucky, his muscles settling in quickly and effortlessly into their familiar slant.

“You are the one who has been following me,” Bucky said. “You move fast. What do you want?”

He had an accent, Steve realized. Subtle, it was not in the words themselves but rather in the spaces between them. Russian had a music to it that as an American Steve had never quite mastered. He made up for it by pretending to be a bit dumb, or affecting the slightly different accent of Leningrad, or Moscow, depending on whether he was visiting the other city. It was always useful to be from somewhere else.

But Bucky had the same accent as him, a bit too fast, as if he were speeding through the words the way a New Yorker would. Steve’s pulse picked up, an involuntary reaction and he hoped it wasn’t too obvious why he was leaning in suddenly, the electricity dancing across his skin such that he wondered the whole room couldn’t see it.

“Just to talk,” Steve said. Neutralize the enemy or encourage him to defect, those were his orders. Those were always the orders. It didn’t mean he always obeyed them.

The Winter Soldier was all jagged edges and wariness, almost feral in his movements. But he gave a sharp nod, and seemed surprised at himself. “Then talk.”

“A drink first?” Steve said casually, offering the bottle to Bucky. Bucky eyed it, and then took the bottle from his hand, pulling off the seal and pouring himself a glass. He looked Steve in the eye as he poured a second one, as if daring Steve to watch his hands for a pill or powder slipped into the drink. Steve did not blink, did not look down at the glass, but kept a firm but pleasant gaze on Bucky until both glasses were filled. Clear droplets landed on worn wood of the bar as Bucky set the bottle aside.

“If you are following me, you know this will do nothing,” Bucky said as he took his first sip.

Steve did not know that. He knew the Winter Soldier was fast, strong, had a metal arm. He knew now that the Winter Soldier was Bucky, miraculously unchanged since that day on the train. Possibilities were spinning in his head. How had he lost the arm? Had it been the fall, or had he volunteered for the procedure? If alcohol did not work it meant that whatever kept Bucky young also increased his metabolism.

“A good drinker then?” Steve said, feigning ignorance, offering the sort of big dumb grin that always made his contacts underestimate him. “I will put a wager on it, if you will match it.”

“I do not gamble,” Bucky said. His eyes narrowed.

“You do not gamble, you do not drink? Tell me, what _do_ you do?” said Steve. This part was usually the easiest, putting the target at ease with small talk. In Russia no business was conducted at the beginning of the night, it would be considered the height of rudeness. And he had not yet fully processed that this was Bucky before him, _if_ it is Bucky before him. It would not be the first time the USSR has used body doubles, and if they knew he was here they could well bring in someone designed to cause him distress. He found that he didn’t care. He hadn’t felt this alive since the war.

Bucky blinked, looked down and right, the knee-jerk reaction a body searching for emotive memory. He looked puzzled at the question, but more puzzled at himself. The moment was brief and he recovered quickly. “Business. And those things would only get in the way of that business.”

“Never heard of business that didn’t involve a little drinking, at least not in this part of the world,” Steve said.

“I am only passing through,” Bucky said and there was a crack in that emotionless exterior, the tiniest impression of a smirk.

It hit Steve like a train. If it was true, if the Winter Soldier knew who he was, knew what he knew, and saw no reason to lie... Steve looked around the bar. The windows were covered by dingy, nicotine-stained lace curtains, the battered furniture was filled with locals, none of whom were looking at the two of them. Sixty miles outside Moscow, what if he had misjudged entirely?

The Winter Soldier wasn’t returning to Moscow, he was going there on an assignment.

Which meant that the Winter Soldier’s masters were not Russian, but from somewhere else, like Steve.

“You see it now?” Bucky said and there was a new lilt, more musical, softer and spoken at the back of the throat, the slight New York accent giving way to a slight German accent on his Russian. Both perfect, both meant to set Steve at ease. “We should both move on.”

“Take me with you,” Steve said, the words out before he could control them. Bucky paused, raising an eyebrow in such a familiar gesture that it brought a lump to Steve’s throat.

“And why would you want to go where I am going?” Bucky said.

Words piled up on his tongue, swallowed back: because it didn’t matter. Because it was Bucky in front of him, and he’d follow him no matter where the path led, and damn his orders. Out here, behind the Curtain it was his call and something was wrong, terribly wrong if James Buchanan Barnes was the Winter Soldier. Had SHIELD recruited him for a new mission? Was this a mission? Had Peggy known?

But no, that was impossible, not when Bucky looked at Steve with eyes that did not know him. Instead he said:

“Your orders are to neutralize targets. Capture or convert. I want to hear more about you,” Steve pressed. “I want to know what they gave the Winter Soldier to make him so deadly. I… want it for myself.”

Bucky started, eyes flashing briefly cold and alarmed at the operative title, fingers twitching as if to shush Steve, or perhaps reach for his gun. Instead he eased back on the bar stool, finished the last of the vodka in one swig, no flinch even though Steve knew that Bucky couldn’t handle anything harder than beer without wincing. The man looked at Steve, considering, something cold and calculating in his eyes that had not been there before.

“Come with me,” Bucky said simply, and stood. He did not look back as he walked out of the bar, left foot treading slightly louder than the right.

Steve stared, then a glance at the bartender revealed that no one had noticed, no one cared about the two strange men, one black haired and one brunet who had walked in, shared a terse conversation, then parted. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. This was Russia after all.

Steve stood, and followed Bucky out.

* * *

A black Gazelle M21 waited outside, the one the Soldier had driven there, already dusted with a layer of snow. Bucky was inside, hard to reconcile the target Steve had followed now and the childhood friend that looked back at him, eyes unknown and hooded with suspicion. Perhaps now the façade would lift, alone in the front seat the coldness would melt from Bucky’s eyes and he’d explain… everything. Why he was here, if he was spying for the KGB or the Stasi or America all these years, letting Steve think… letting him think…

Bucky wasn’t dead, but something had happened to him. The metal arm was invisible under the heavy black military coat Bucky wore, his hair was longer and framed his face in a way that the boy Steve had known would have gone mad pushing back out of his face. He was broader since the war too, putting back on the muscles they had lost to hunger on the front. Steve by contrast was leaner, shedding it as the role of the soldier gave way to the role of the spy, blond hair traded for black, all meant for a less distinguishable target. No one was looking for Captain America in a gunmetal gray suit.

Bucky revved the engine, didn’t even look at Steve as he put the car in gear and pulled away from the roadside bar, on the pitted road towards Moscow.  They sat in silence, a long silence that spread across hours as Bucky dodged deep potholes as if by a sixth sense, and every time his left hand shifted other on the steering wheel there was a heavy sound, dampened by the gloves he wore on both hands. The car was unheated and Steve thought nothing of leaving their many layers on against the Russian fall that by American standards would be the depths of winter. The metal arm. Impossible, the technology was ages ahead of anything even Stark could imagine. And the only people to ever baffle Stark with their technology were certainly not the Soviets, everything they had they had taken either from turncoat American and British spies or during the sack of Berlin when they had raided…

“HYDRA,” Steve breathed.

“ _Da_ , _tovarishch_ ,” Bucky said, face impassive as they drove through the night.

* * *

They stopped every six hours, precisely, to relieve themselves and Bucky did the driving, barely blinking, never asking to switch. There was food in the back that Bucky indicated with a grunt and a nod, and they spoke no more of it. Steve spent the whole time just looking at him, memorizing every inch of his face, assuring himself that this _was_ Bucky, or the most convincing fake he had ever seen.

They were not going to Moscow, that much was clear. To the sea, perhaps, all the way south and Steve’s heart can’t help a faster, hopeful thud that maybe they’re going somewhere off the grid. Somewhere where Bucky can finally tell him what was going on.

About an hour from Sochi, where intelligence said the party leaders go for their summers, Bucky spoke for the first time.

“So, you want to defect. Tired of playing Captain America?”

He spoke in English, but the harsh Brooklyn accent had been replaced by lilting Russian. Jarring to hear Bucky speak in English like that, like an actor in a Vaudeville pretending to be a foreigner. Bucky took his eyes off the road, only for a second, and his gaze is cold as he looked over at Steve then back.

“You know who I am?” Steve said, dumfounded, and the thrill of hope was so sharp it ached. Bucky only snorted.

“I have since you tracked me from Helsinki. But you do not truly wish to defect, you want the serum, don’t you? Otherwise your government cannot keep pretending,” Bucky spat, the first flicker of emotion behind the facade: rage.

“Serum?” Steve said blankly. The long hours, the switch to English, Bucky staring back at him… he did not even try to hide his own accent, or lie. Then again, he’d always been more of a soldier than a spy. Maybe seeing Bucky was all it took to remind him of that.

“Serum, _my_ serum,” Bucky snapped. “They have told me who you are. The imposter your government made to replace him. A poor copy. They have no serum, so they send you after me. Well, you may have your serum, friend, and you may defect if you wish. I doubt they will give you the option.” Steve looked up as Bucky slammed on the brakes, dragging the car over the gravel at the side of the road.

Then the men stepped out from behind the trees. Even knowing, even with the suspicion that had been building in his mind since he first saw the Soldier’s file, seeing the skulls and tentacles again was like seeing a ghost.

No shield with him, he hadn’t brought it, and the gun at the small of his back only had six bullets while twenty men surrounded the car, one opened the driver side door and Bucky…

Bucky’s face was slack, his eyes glassy and wide, etched white with fear as a masked man leaned in. Jaw clenched, Bucky stared as if frozen, the smooth, self-assured agent that had greeted Steve at the canteen vanished behind a visage of terror.

“You have done well, Sergeant Barnes. It is time to rest now,” the HYDRA agent said, placing a black gloved hand on Bucky’s shoulder and leaning in, he whispered, “ _Petrushka_.”

Bucky went limp. His body slouched in the seat, eyes rolled back into his head and as if he were no more than a slab of meat, the HYDRA agent hefted Bucky from the seat, slinging him over his shoulder, then turned and gave Steve a pleasant smile.

The man was strong, broad across the shoulders, face nondescript and hair graying at the temples surrounding a nondescript face that Steve would have passed in the street without a second glance. His own seat belt was off, hand feeling at his lower back for the gun. He didn’t need to kill all of them, just enough to escape, grab Bucky and go.

“Captain Rogers,” the agent said, tone as pleasant as his smile, and just as hollow. “I’m quite aware you can kill me, just as you should know we could have killed you by now. We’ve been tracking your car with our snipers for the past hour. We know you are here to talk, so, let us talk.”

“There would have been a better chance of that if you’d left the uniforms at home,” Steve retorted, his fingers closing around the grip.

“Then perhaps I should begin,” the agent said, and leaning forward slipped Bucky’s slack body from his shoulder to his arm, and in one smooth motion put the muzzle to Bucky’s temple.

Steve seized forward, froze as the agent shook his head. “I’m sure you are very curious as to why Sergeant Barnes is serving us now. However, he is only one asset of many. We can discuss our options like civilized men, or we can begin the fight now, albeit one man down.”

Steve’s jaw tightened, eying the men around him, Bucky in their grip, the outline of their convoy hidden behind the tree, not difficult to see if he hadn’t been studying Bucky’s face during the drive. The gun was imprinting into the skin on the small of his back, not enough bullets.

He needed time.

“Fine,” Steve said, raising both hands. “Let’s talk.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I'd really love to hear your opinion, especially since I'm juggling a few different Steve/Bucky fics and debating which one to pursue. I'd love to hear your opinion!
> 
> I can also be found on Tumblr with the username: Avelera.


End file.
